Are they allowed to park at the stadium? Do they pay?
Well⌠perhaps some of them would walk if it were easier & more safe 
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Again⌠from where would they be walking? The school is in the middle of a low/mid rise office park in all directions with the exception of the stadium complex. The only walkable residential would be the Wade Park apartments and the apartments on Corporate Center. It would be a stretch (except for maybe @John) to assume folks are walking from the houses in Wade Park to CG. CG chose to build at this location, that decision is on them. But playing the âpedestrian safety b/c weâre a school cardâ and pearl clutching at potential development on another parcel is BS IMO.
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I would point out that I live in a neighborhood of single family homes that sell for $700k to over a million, and these are walkable to CG, Lenovo, etc. I have no idea if any of the kids go to CG tho. I havenât really noticed any fancy car shenanigans when leaving the neighborhood (except my own). I do look incredibly youthful, so maybe you mistook me for a student. 
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This story broke this morning, and the only story I can find so far is behind a paywall, but hereâs an excerpt for now, and hopefully some free-to-read stories can be added soon:
"The United Soccer League (USL) is set to launch a new division one menâs professional league, with the aim of expanding its presence in the U.S. and increasing the availability of top-tier soccer across the continent.
The USL currently fields two professional leagues: the second-division USL Championship and third-division USL League One. It now intends to have a 12- or 14-team first-division league up and running in 2027-28 that would operate as a separate and competing D1 entity from Major League Soccer (MLS)."
This is big news for North Carolina FC because it plays in the USL Championship. Iâm not sure that competing head-to-head with MLS is going to work, but the USL model has several major differences from the MLS model that I think give it a real chance of success: it will finally bring promotion-and-relegation to American soccer, it runs menâs and womenâs leagues run by the same leadership, and it uses the traditional each-owner-owns-one-team model, like all of the big four North American sports leagues, instead of MLSâs model where each owner owns 1/30 of the league plus territorial rights.
Of those, promotion-and-relegation would be the huge deal because it would mean that North Carolina FC wouldnât have to convince the MLS front office to be so kind as to let the team pay $500 million in expansion fees to join the top flight. They could just play their way into the top flight by being better than the other teams in the league.
Like I said, I donât know that this will work, but it is fantastic news. MLS sucks, its whole business model sucks, and it would be fantastic for soccer if USL blew it all up and the local team was able to earn, not purchase, its way into the top flight. A rival to MLS might seems like a crazy idea, but the modern MLB, NFL, NBA, and NHL were all the product of at least one merger between the existing league and a rival league that challenged the incumbent head-on. In contrast, the sort of intensely centrally managed model that MLS is trying to use has never yet produced a big-business sports league in the U.S.
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Why walk to school when you can drive a Range Rover, Audi, or Tesla that mom and dad bought for you? 
@GucciLittlePig I could pick you out of a lineup. Iâll gladly report your shenanigans for everyone here. haha
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This is good news. I just wish Malik would find some help on the advertising side. The team should be much more supported than they are, but I feel like most people donât even know they exist.
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Thatâs awesome. MLSâ business model was important in the early years to stop New York Cosmos style over-reaching and implosions, but now itâs really holding the league back and incentivizing a comfy cartel of mid-level teams that would have trouble competing the English second division.
However, much like you Iâm unfortunately not optimistic it will actually take off.
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Until we have a team announcement and approval and shovels on the ground for a stadium, we have no team.
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Iâm all for it only to watch all that franchise buy-in money get vaporized
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Itâs shade more than double the tuition at NC State
Very interesting article. Thanks for posting. I would love for there to be a US league with promotion and relegation! It would be great to give teams near the bottom a reason to actually compete (instead of tanking as often happens in football and basketball).
The story emphasizes that pro - rel is a long-term goal. "Weâre not there yet, but weâll continue to push forward with it.â, so it sounds like it might not be instituted from the start.
I thought this section of the story was interesting, it details the required minimum standards to be D1. Most notably, all teams must have an enclosed stadium with a capacity of at least 15,000. So from that, maybe all D2 teams would need to meet those same requirements to be eligible to be promotedâŚ
âU.S. Soccerâs pro league standards for menâs leagues require D1 outfits to have at least 12 teams, located across the Eastern, Central and Pacific time zones, with at least 75% of the teams playing in metropolitan markets of at least 1 million people. All league stadiums must be enclosed with a minimum seating capacity of 15,000. The league must also meet several levels of financial viability, including ownership groups that can demonstrate the financial capability to operate a team for five years. A first-division league must also have a broadcast contract, full-time team staff for each club and a full-time league operations staff.â
Obviously NCFC doesnât meet those requirements now, and indeed, the story notes that there is an expectation that multiple teams will move from the USL Championship (the division NCFC is in) into the new first-division league, âincluding markets like Louisville, Sacramento, Indianapolis, Phoenix and Las Vegas.â with no mention of NC.
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Agreed - I see this as NIMBY work. The school is literally located in a major intersection of activity (by choice IMO as the major draws were there long before the school), the student safety stance is reasonable but getting too carried away with how much of an impact these improvements will have on their student population is a bit of a reach. They should adapt to it as they chose to build in a location off of a major interstate, major athletic complex, fairgrounds, etc. I am sure it is the area of the metro with the largest spectator draw by a long shot so acting as though the added density will somehow endanger all of the existing infrastructure is not remotely reasonable.
I went to a private high school, thanks to a truckload of financial aid. Plenty of immigrant families scrimp and save to send their kids to private school. Not every student there is the double-popped collar broseph and barbie of your imagination.
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Yeah, I think the obvious endgame for this would be a MLS-USL merger, not unlike the NL-AL merger in baseball or the NFL-AFL merger in football, with the Canadian teams probably getting hived off and sent to the Canadian Premier League. (So only some of that franchise buy-in money would get vaporized.) And in that scenario, thereâs no way that North Carolina FC would start life in the top tier. But the whole point would be that they would always have the chance to play their way in or out. The exciting thing about being in the second division in a promotion-relegation league is that every team is playing for one of the guaranteed promotion slots. The stadium requirements would be an issue for a lot of cities, but thatâs probably a problem North Carolina FC could solve.
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Though the two speakers at the commission meeting didnât get all of their message out in the allotted time, the gist of what they were saying is that all of the new things that will be built around the stadium will entice more pedestrians crossing Edwardâs Mill, and that it needs to be recognized and planned for that outcome.
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Iâm surprised at all this pushback on requesting better pedestrian and bike access. To me the comments did not seem like they were trying to tank the development, just improve it in a very reasonable way.
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I just sincerely cannot get excited for soccer, no matter what level it is, sorry 
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I completely agree with your earlier post that the MLS is an absolutely terrible product, but I think the thing that would hold back the USL is limited capital. If you canât bring in the worldâs best players youâre always going to have a second tier product.
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Is there any way that a draft could be made to work in a league system with promotion and relegation?
I do sort of like how the draft can give the worse-off teams, often from smaller (read: less rich) markets a chance to succeed, without having to get bought out by a Saudi prince. I wouldnât necessarily consider it a win if pro soccer here made an all-out transformation to the European model, where each league has 1 to 6 predictably successful teams, and dynasties rise and fall on the time scale of decades rather than years. Itâs also kind of annoying how it seems to be about 8-10 teams constantly bouncing back and forth between EPL and the Championship, with very few promoted teams ever managing to really gain a foothold.
It seems that a US-style draft PLUS euro-style promotion/relegation could give the best of both worlds: teams near the bottom have an even stronger incentive to not just TANK, because not only do they get to stay in the top league, but will also get an early draft pick.
However, thatâs only if a workable set of rules can be figured out, and itâs not immediately clear to me if this would be possible. Seems like it could be a challenge.
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